Wired youth forget how to write in China and Japan

This is the consequence of using pinyin and romaji transliterations of Chinese and Japanese written language on computers and phones, and also in the case of Japanese, using the hirigana syllabary in place of the more complex kanji characters.

Both written languages have been greatly simplified from their original forms, though they are still extremely laborious to memorize.

Cell phones can be both the source of the problem, and the means to look up the forgotten characters. There also exist optical character recognition programs in phone apps which serve as aids in translating Kanji.